Tuesday, May 19, 2015

It's a horror story beyond thought; being cooked alive in the same factory where you have been working for a long time. For factories where food is processed, or where boilers are used, or in steel furnaces, and so on, places which are hazardous and could be dangerous for the people who work there; there are strict conditions to prevent workplace accidents. However, even when such processes are in place, there can be cases when industrial accidents do happen, and can be very dangerous for the people who are caught there.
Major problems that happen are due to such incidents such as boiler explosions, or gas fumes / leakages, but there can be accidents such as the ones describes in this post. Imagine doing cleaning work up in a large cooker, suddenly to find that the cooker has been switched on and no way to get out of there. One wonders how somebody could have a situation where the cooker could be switched on without confirming that nobody was inside, but it happened. But as the article mentions, there are many cases of industrial accidents, but charges are laid in very few of these incidents (link to article):

Los Angeles prosecutors say the men and the company itself violated safety regulations, which resulted in the tragic death of Jose Melena in October of 2012.
Melena, 62, was performing maintenance in a 35-foot-long oven at the company's Santa Fe Springs plant before dawn Oct. 11, 2012, when a co-worker, who mistakenly believed Melena was in the bathroom, filled the pressure cooker with 12,000 pounds of canned tuna and it was turned on.
When a supervisor noticed Melena was missing, an announcement was made on the intercom and employees searched for him in the facility and parking lot, according to a report by the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health.
His body was found two hours later after the pressure cooker, which reached a temperature of 270 degrees, was turned off and opened.